Postcolonial Studies Glossary

In Bhabha's work, the simultaneous attraction and repulsion characterizing the colonizer-colonized relationship, making colonial authority unstable.

The system of knowledge, texts, and representations through which colonial powers constructed and maintained authority over colonized peoples.

Quijano's concept describing how colonial racial hierarchies persist in global institutions and knowledge systems beyond formal colonialism.

A local elite class in colonized or postcolonial societies that serves the interests of foreign capital and colonial or neocolonial powers.

The process of cultural mixing and creation of new hybrid practices, languages, and identities in colonial and postcolonial settings.

A framework from Latin American scholarship that critiques the coloniality embedded in Western modernity, tracing it to the 1492 conquest of the Americas.

The historical process of achieving political independence and the ongoing project of dismantling colonial structures of thought and power.

The dispersion of a people from their original homeland, and the communities they form across different territories.

The destruction or marginalization of non-Western knowledge systems through colonial education and intellectual frameworks.

Domination achieved through cultural and ideological means rather than force alone, derived from Gramsci and applied to colonial contexts.

The creation of new, mixed cultural forms and identities arising from the encounter between colonizer and colonized cultures.

In Fanon's work, the binary division of the colonial world into rigid opposites: colonizer/colonized, civilized/savage, white/Black.

The colonized subject's ambivalent imitation of the colonizer's culture that is 'almost the same, but not quite,' potentially subverting colonial authority.

Political movements and struggles for independence from colonial rule, often involving both armed resistance and intellectual decolonization.

A literary movement affirming Black cultural identity, founded by Cesaire, Senghor, and Damas in the 1930s as resistance to French assimilation.

The continuation of colonial economic and political domination through indirect mechanisms after formal independence.

The Western tradition of producing stereotyped and essentialized representations of Eastern societies that justified colonial domination, as analyzed by Edward Said.

The process of defining a group as fundamentally different and inferior to reinforce the dominant group's identity and superiority.

A political and intellectual movement advocating the unity and solidarity of people of African descent worldwide against colonialism and racism.

Literary works by authors from formerly colonized regions that engage with the experience, legacy, and critique of colonialism.

A form of colonialism in which colonizers permanently settle on Indigenous land, seeking to replace the original population.

Spivak's concept of marginalized groups temporarily adopting a unified identity for political mobilization while recognizing internal diversity.

Populations excluded from power structures in colonial and postcolonial society, whose perspectives are systematically marginalized in dominant discourses.

Bhabha's concept of an in-between zone of cultural negotiation where new hybrid identities and meanings emerge.

Fernando Ortiz's concept describing the reciprocal and unequal cultural exchange between colonizer and colonized, producing new cultural phenomena.